Silver Guilt (23 page)

‘I've come to update you, Mr Tripp – Griff,' she corrected herself, as she sat down.

‘Well, you must sit down and have a cup of tea while you do so. I don't suppose there are any biscuits left, Lina, my darling?'

She waved a hand. ‘Not for me, thanks. Lent. I know it's not fashionable to give things up these days . . .'

‘Don't apologize, Sally. I've just spent the best part of a week with someone who's given up alcohol for Lent. So I found I had to join him in his abstinence. I can't wait for Lina to tell me it's officially evening and I can have a glass. She bosses me terribly, the dear girl.' He squeezed my hand. I squeezed his back. Fancy the old bugger learning to read my thoughts.

Sally's news was that on the basis of the mug shot he'd picked out, they were on to a local speed merchant who was currently driving despite a ban. The DNA they'd got from the van should prove it.

‘I thought they could do it like that.' Griff clicked his fingers. ‘They do on
The Bill
.'

‘Their budgets are fiction. Ours are for real. In fact,' she added, lowering her voice, ‘if we hadn't especially wanted to get young Dean Pardoe, we probably wouldn't have bothered, since no material damage was done. Except to your glasses.'

‘Hang on! Assaulting a man Griff's age!'

‘Priorities, Ms Tripp. But as soon as the DNA results come through we shall be on to him, don't you worry. If you don't mind appearing in the witness box, Mr Tripp. A lot of people won't go to court. It can be quite a stressful experience.'

Griff chuckled. ‘If you are suggesting that defence counsel will allege that I am an appalling driver who would drive our own dear queen to violence, I am prepared for that. But I trust any witnesses will tell you that while I was slow, I was purposeful – at least until he did his best to commit sexual assault on my exhaust pipe.'

She returned his smile. ‘CCTV does show your driving and his to be much as you've described it, Mr Tripp.' She got to her feet. ‘I'll be in touch as soon as I know anything – I promise,' she added, looking really nonplussed as Griff kissed her hand in one of his lovely courtly gestures.

It was only five thirty when she left, but I thought Griff deserved it.

‘I've got a bottle of the champagne Lord Elham recommends,' I said. ‘And it's been waiting in the fridge to welcome you home.'

W
hoever this guy Pardoe was, it sounded as if he wasn't Darrenarris. At least I thought it did, until I remembered that the police hadn't finally ID'd him, and that in any case Darrenarris might not be my half-brother anyway, but just a con artist robbing a vulnerable old man. And whatever his name might be, he'd been angry enough for my father, who didn't do things in a hurry, to pick up the phone and warn me. So I locked up as carefully as usual, something that didn't escape Griff, although he'd got at least half a bottle of champagne inside him.

‘Morris isn't staying here tonight?' he asked mildly.

‘Not with you to strong-arm any would-be assailants,' I said. ‘Actually, things seem to have gone quiet on the Darrenarris front. The theft of that little musical snuff box apart, of course.'

‘Nor Piers?'

He looked well enough for me to tell him a few details of my weekend. I filleted out some of them, but not enough to stop him deducing that Piers had behaved like a louse.

‘So you sent him to the rightabout?'

‘Not exactly. The thing is, Griff, we both suspect he's up to something, don't we? Even if we've no proof? If I just stop seeing him – not that I see much of him anyway, but if I make a song and dance about it – then he'll find some other mug and keep on with whatever the scam is. So I thought I'd go along with it – and him – a bit longer. Actually,' I added really casually, ‘I might have an idea.'

He sighed. ‘I'm not going to like it, am I?'

‘OK. It involves Lord Elham. Those earrings are supposed to belong to someone called Lady Olivia Spedding. Lord Elham might just know something about her. I'll ask next time I see him. But you're involved too – no, not with Lord Elham. With that gem . . . gemmologist friend of yours.'

He smiled – I'd got the term right. ‘Wally Brown?'

‘Right. I want him to look at this ring and tell us about the dodgy diamonds. They may not be just bad stones – they might actually be fakes, good fakes, if you see what I mean.' I pulled the ruby from my finger and put in his hand. ‘We'll send it tomorrow. Before I change my mind.'

‘I'll ask him to prioritize it. What about the earrings?'

I shook my head. ‘We're both sure they're kosher, aren't we? But I bet the next thing of Lady Olivia's won't be.'

‘What does Morris have to say about this?'

‘Why Morris?'

‘He might not view your involvement so lightly.'

I frowned. ‘Aren't we covering ourselves if we sell “as seen”?'

‘I wish I could be sure. We have a reputation to maintain, my sweet one – we have to be careful where we dabble. And you have a valuable friendship with a man whose job demands he take action against fraud.'

‘There's no harm in selling the earrings anyway, is there?' I said, needing time to think.

And we did sell them – very quickly indeed. And for the sum Piers had asked for. A couple of days later at a fair near Oxford I was doing on my own, since I didn't think Griff was quite well enough to venture further than the shop, I handed over the cash in the traditional brown envelope. It was hardly out of my hand when another slightly battered jewel-case appeared, purple leather outside, purple silk in, showing off a filthy diamond pendant and matching earrings to perfection. Little emeralds on minute springs danced like leaves. Once it was cleaned the set would be exquisite. Perhaps.

‘You know I always ask about provenance,' I said, as if I might have been joking but wasn't.

‘Same as before.'

It was all so low key we might have been just business partners, not close enough for me to have been wearing his ring. Not that I was, today – my ring finger was swathed in bandages from tip to knuckle, as if I'd had an accident with my restoring scalpel. If he'd shown any concern, even asked about it, I might have told him everything. Grassing someone up was something not to be done lightly. But in a trade that totally depended on trust, what else could I do?

When I got back, Griff had had news from Wally. It wasn't good. The suspicious stones in my ring were actually man-made. Fake, in other words. I handed over the pendant and earring set without a word. Equally silently Griff popped in his eyepiece and inspected them, stone by stone.

At long last, Griff removed the eyepiece and rubbed his face. ‘You buy a couple of these so-called man-made diamonds for a song, remove two decent-sized stones from pieces where no one will immediately notice the exchange, replace them with the fakes, make the whole item filthy dirty so people think they're buying from someone with an aged relative who doesn't know they'd sell better clean and pocket the difference. If you got brave enough to replace a one carat diamond, say, with a fake one, you could profit by four or five thousand pounds.'

I nodded. ‘To get away with it, you really need someone totally reliable like us. If by any chance people found they'd bought a wrong 'un they'd hotfoot it back to us and complain. And we could only say we'd had them from someone else and terribly sorry and here's your money back.'

‘You complain to Piers, who laughs in your face. Or says his aunt must have replaced them to raise cash for her gambling habit or booze or whatever.'

‘And in any case he reminds us it's
caveat emptor
.' There weren't many Latin phrases I knew but that was one of them. ‘But to my mind it's more a case of
caveat
ing Trading Standards or even the police. I really ought to involve Morris, oughtn't I?'

‘Oh, dear one, you can't use
caveat
like that,' he sighed. ‘But you're right about the legal implications. To my mind, the only question is how much Piers knows about it.'

‘If his genes are anything like Lord Elham's, a lot.'

He kissed me. ‘Now, that chicken should be cooked to perfection.'

Over supper we debated long and loud what we should do next. Now I really wanted to pack up the so-called diamonds and send them straight back to Piers. With the offending ‘friendship' ring. But, as I'd said, if we did, he'd certainly try to palm them off on someone else less canny than us.

‘Equally, of course, Piers might be a dupe of someone to whom he'd innocently taken old items to be cleaned,' Griff observed resignedly. ‘And it's the cleaner who's at fault.'

‘Not the cleaner – look at the state of those.' I pointed. ‘I've got to talk to Lord Elham, haven't I?'

‘Or Morris. And Morris.'

I nodded. ‘It had better be face to face. So I can make sure they don't get the wrong idea.' Morris especially.

I couldn't do it first thing next morning, however, because I had to set out early for a house sale the far side of Tunbridge Wells. These days Griff often let me go to small auctions like this on my own, trusting my experience, not to mention my antennae, to pick up bargains. I didn't need either today. Nothing was going for its proper value: even a little collection of Ruskin, usually the sort of thing dealers fight over, went cheaply enough for me to buy the lot.

‘Good for you, doll.' Titus' voice sounded like gravel in a bucket as he came up behind me in the queue to settle up. ‘Doing the right thing – buying while the market's down. It'll go up, you mark my words.' Then he dropped his voice even further. ‘You got one of them clever phones that'll take pictures? You see that guy over there, leather coat? No, the brown one. Get a snap of him if you can. Because he's the one as says he's Lord Elham's son.'

‘Darrenarris!' I was ready to abandon the queue and my Ruskin and tackle him.

Oates kept me where I was by gripping both shoulders and keeping me facing front. ‘Hush your noise. That's his name, is it? No, he's never said as much, not in so many words – boxing clever, see? Just letting it go round that he's the illegit son of a mad lord, him with the daughter who's a dealer. Only to my mind he don't look much like the old bastard. You do – got something of his eyes about you. Honest. Only at least yours aren't bloodshot!' he cackled.

I let him rattle on, doing as he suggested and taking as many photos as I could without drawing attention to myself. By now I'd reached the front of the queue, though, and had to pay attention to money and forms.

Darrenarris'd gone, of course, by the time I'd finished. So had Titus. I didn't need him to tell me I owed him.

I swathed each piece in loads of bubble wrap before stowing it carefully into one of the plastic boxes I keep in the van, which I then locked securely – the Ruskin might have been cheap but that didn't mean someone wouldn't take it off my hands. Then I looked round. No sign of either of them. But at least, thanks to Titus, I had something for Morris to go on when I spoke to him.

I'd only been on the road ten minutes, a dodge route avoiding the worst of the traffic, when my phone rang. Not a lay-by in sight. I'd just have to hope whoever it was left a message. Only to find out, when it was safe to pull over into a side road and look, that they hadn't. And they didn't want the call returned either. I'd just hope they'd try again. And then I got scared. Here I was on a stretch of road with not very good mobile coverage, and if I'd seen Darrenarris at the sale, he must have seen me. Or at least the van. He might well have lurked out of sight and worked out which route I'd be taking back to Bredeham. There weren't all that many obvious ones. I didn't think he'd been tailing me, at least not close to, or I'd have noticed him in my rear view mirror. What if he'd shot ahead and was waiting for me somewhere?

If anyone knew anything, it'd be Titus. It took seconds to find his number and call it. But if he was on the road, he wouldn't pick up, would he? Law-abiding was his middle name, if it came to doing anything that might attract police attention. I was in luck.

‘Hello, doll. Been trying to call you. You all right?'

‘Fine.'

‘So far. You got to that little B road to Maidstone yet? Well turn round and head back to the A228, that's all I'll say. Everyone's heard about Griff's accident. Some folks might like you to have one too. And you've got all that nice Ruskin in the van.' He ended the call.

Funnily enough, I didn't do exactly what he said. Yes, I turned round. But I picked up the B road going down towards Lamberhurst. Miles out of my way, of course. But it was a little closer to Bossingham Hall, if the crow was drunk while it flew, that is.

If Lord Elham identified Brown Leather Jacket as Darrenarris I had to phone Morris. And sometime I'd better work out why I really didn't want to.

There's a most wonderful shop in Stelling Minnis, the next village to Bossingham, where you can get everything, from wellies to fresh lemon grass. Griff would have loved it. I grabbed a basket, filling it with fresh fruit, which I would make into a fruit salad for my father. He might not eat it all, not if I wasn't there to stand over him, but at least he'd pick up a few vitamins. Vegetables for a stir-fry. Meat and more vegetables for a casserole. I'd call Griff and tell him I'd be late, but not fill in all the details.

I'd just paid and had put the carrier bags on the van's passenger seat when I saw a familiar blond figure. It was Robin Levitt, the priest attached to the parish's two churches, neither of which was actually in the village. He had explained why, a matter of drifting populations and church politics, but since I went to neither it didn't really bother me. Robin was drop-dead gorgeous, it had to be said, Adam's apple apart. He looked frail, like a droopy Victorian poet in one of Griff's books, but in fact was extremely tough. I'd seen him in action when he'd saved me from some thugs.